Archive | Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series

from a weary mom after the holidays

January 6, 2014 at 1:51 pm

I don’t know what exactly snapped on Saturday night, but it was at that point that I decided I’d had it with the kids.

Too many mornings staggering around the kitchen half-asleep listening to Lena recite what she would like for breakfast (“I want Grape Nuts with some of your milk in a bowl and then some of Daddy’s milk in a cup! OK, Mama? OK? I want Grape Nuts with some of your milk…”) and putting food on Gil’s tray as fast as he can eat it while just longing to sit quietly, read my book, and sip my cup of coffee. Too many hours on the floor with my children, building the same towers or scooping the same markers and crayons back into the same Tupperware container after we all “color” together. Too many hours in the kitchen throwing together meal after snack after meal after snack for my family. Too much time in the house, not enough time outside, not enough time with other people.

Marriage is like dancing, and at that moment on Saturday night, I just couldn’t dance anymore. One thing I’m learning, though, is that even when your partner stumbles, the music — that is, life — keeps right on going. The kids still need your help, the stomachs still need to be filled, the routine still must go on. Sometimes both partners stop dancing at the same time, and it’s messy and sad. But in that moment, Elliott kept dancing even though I couldn’t. He played with the kids, put them in the bath, and then, after they were in bed, he found me and encouraged me.

In those moments, I felt like a failure. I said I wanted to do this stay-at-home mom thing while the kids were tiny, and Elliott has not only been fine with this but has also praised me, supported me, and been grateful for me. But on Saturday night I just wanted a break from my life. Unfortunately, there was really no feasible way to do that. Like most situations, the easiest answer was just to get a good night’s sleep, pray for strength and perspective, and start again the next day.

Honestly, I think part of the issue was that I just didn’t get out of the house enough over the holidays. Christmas through New Year’s keep people at home with their families, which is wonderful in some ways, but my home includes two kids two and under… ack! They need more to wear them out than just block towers, and I need more to give me a break than just their two-hour nap every afternoon.

It’s Monday morning now, and it’s a new day. There is coffee in my cup, laundry in the machine, and sunshine streaming through the windows. It’s highlighting all the dirt on the floor, but… I’ll tackle that eventually. Gil is napping, Lena is at a friend’s house, and Siena is rubbing affectionately against my legs, then dashing ahead of me with a little Maine Coon-chortle wherever I go. I pray at the end of Gil’s nap I can pick him up with genuine joy and go to meet Lena with anticipation and thankfulness.

What do you do to help you recharge your batteries when you’re tired of your work, whatever it might be? No matter what our profession, we all have to show up the next day (or right after nap time) with a smile on our faces and a can-do attitude. How do you get there? What recharges you?

27 :: in Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, motherhood, naptime diaries, thoughts

my 2013 goals in review

January 2, 2014 at 2:43 pm

Biggest and proudest accomplishment of 2013: my contribution to creating and caring for this family of mine!

OK, after a year of work… 2013 is over, and it’s time to review my goals for this past year! Sharing them publicly with all of you is definitely a way to keep me accountable, and I think it helped me stay on track a little better this year than I did in 2012.

If you’d like to, I would love to hear about how well you accomplished your goals (or resolutions), or you could link to your blog posts about them in the comments, too!

Here’s how I did with my 2013 goals:

Love Elliott and Lena and our Baby Boy.

Nothing like keeping my priorities straight! How can I measure this one? I definitely found myself frequently stretched to love my family with patience, compassion, creativity, and humility, particularly when Gil was tiny and we were adjusting to being a family of four. Through it all, though, my love for my family has become deeper than ever, and I am more in love with Elliott and more invested in my whole family than I was a year before. It is wonderful to see my heart full to bursting with love… and then realize a year later that my love has miraculously grown.

Finish War and Peace!

Fail. Total. Complete. Fail. I literally did not even open the book all year. I did move it from my bedside table (where it was mocking me) to the floor (where it continued to mock me) to the guest room (where I was grateful to finally forget about it). I’m hoping for better luck next year with me and Prince Andrei, Natasha, Pierre, Hélène, Nikolai, etc. etc. etc….

Read at least 10 classics that I haven’t read but have always wanted to read.

In the minutiae of motherhood, reading is a respite and a relief to me. (How alliterative! Now I’m on a roll.) Reading books continues my education in an academic sense even when the rest of my life is mostly preparing and cleaning up food, facilitating sleep, and providing wholesome and creativity activities for little minds. When my body is exhausted, I can rest with a book. Other than conversations with Elliott before we fall asleep — or sleep itself — I can’t think of a more restful activity for me.

I also have a deeply satisfying sense of accomplishment when I read the last page and close another book. I can’t quite describe it. It is an accomplishment that cannot be taken away from me, that cannot be undone by little fingers, that is recognized by everyone as a great achievement, and that contributes profoundly to who I am as a person.

I’ve set book reading goals for myself for two years in a row now. In 2012 I resolved to read a book a week for 52 books total, and this past year I resolved to read 40 books. At 11:33pm on December 31st, I finished my 45th book of 2013, including 10 classics. And oh, that feeling of achievement! I’m so glad I did it, and I think I’ll set the same goal again next year. These are the classics that I read in 2013:

A Passage to India by E.M. Forester
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Confessions by St. Augustine
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Persuasion by Jane Austen
The Road by Cormac McCarthy

(I use this Book List Challenge to help me keep track of classics I’ve read and want to read. It’s not definitive, of course, but it is fun! I’ve read 50 of these books… 50 more to go.)

If you’d like to challenge yourself to read more in 2014, I highly recommend Goodreads. It’s like Facebook for bookworms! It’s a fantastic way to learn about new books, see what your friends are reading, keep track of your own reading (because otherwise I never remember), and set reading goals. You can become my friend on Goodreads right here.

Sell 50 handmade items either through craft fairs or through my Etsy shop.

I sold 56. Thank you to all of you who bought something from me!

Study Italian

I planned to complete this Italian workbook as well as the two volumes of Pimsleur Italian audio series. I finished the audio series but not the workbook. I did made good headway into it, though, so I think I’ll finish the book as one of my 2013 goals… before we leave Italy, of course!

Learn more about and practice the manual settings on my camera.

I did do this, but I am still scratching the surface of the manual settings. I know this is the next big step for me in improving my photography (umm… duh), but I have such a comfort zone with the automatic settings on my DSLR and find it hard to imagine that my fumbling with the manual settings will really change my photographs very much. I know that’s not true. Right?

Launch my blog on a new website.

Done as of January 28th, 2013 (< also the day I announced Gil’s birth). I still don’t feel as comfortable with WordPress as I did with Blogspot, but I am grateful to own all my content and to have complete power over the look of my website.

Maybe I’ll beautify a few things around here in 2014. If you have any blog-improvement suggestions (like formatting or helpful features or whatnot), I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Publish a piece of writing (fiction or non-fiction) in a non-blog setting.

Nope. Sigh. I did read a piece of my writing at our church’s women’s Christmas event, so maybe this goal was partially accomplished. But speaking vs. writing wasn’t exactly what I was intending when I made this goal, so I think I’ll try again in 2014.

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So that was 2013! Tomorrow I’ll publish my list of goals for 2014. I’m still working on writing some of them, but other goals are underway already. Again, if you’d like to share your 2013 or 2014 goals, I’d love to hear about them!

6 :: in Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, book reviews, good reads, motherhood, thoughts

how we spend our days {Part 2 of 2}

November 19, 2013 at 2:24 pm

(If you’d like to see Part 1 of this little series, click here. Just for fun — and for myself in the years to come — I’m documenting a day with my family in our home in Sicily. The day also happened to be my 27th birthday!)

When I left off yesterday, it was about 11am on November 14, and Gil was still napping. Lena and I moved out to the balcony to hang our bedroom sheets from the railing; they billowed and retracted with the breeze. I asked Lena to take the dry cloth diapers off the rack for me, and she stacked them while I “stuffed” the diapers with absorbent inserts. She’s a good helper!

She found a millipede, one of many in our house.

Diapers are stuffed and stacked… and ready to be snapped back onto Mr. Gil whenever he needs them. Lena reached through the balcony to touch the dark blue sheets as they dried.

Back into the kitchen. I gave Lena a snack of frozen berries mixed with organic vanilla yogurt. We can’t get very many berries locally here in Sicily (besides picking wild blackberries in season, that is!), so I try to feed Lena mixes of various berries. She ate her snack while I washed the dishes and put them up to dry in our over-the-sink drying cupboard (an Italian kitchen feature that I love). When she was almost done, she brought me her bowl. “Can you get one more bite for me, Mama?” I scraped her bowl and found three more bites.

It’s 12pm and someone’s awake! Lena runs to him first, saying, “Gil! Aww, Gil! You got up so early, Gil!” I love how she repeats whatever she hears me say… well, most of the time I like to hear her repeat it.

On the left, this is where Gil is whenever I come into the room after his nap: pressing his head into the mesh and waiting eagerly for us to come racing in, scoop him up, snuggle him. Right now Gil is sleeping in a pack ‘n’ play in the guest room while Lena still sleeps in her crib in her room. I thought we’d transition them to the same bedroom with Gil in the crib and Lena in a regular bed after Gil was a few months old. However, it’s made more sense to keep them separated because we usually have two bedrooms at our disposal and they sleep/nap much better apart. Also, Lena still can’t get out of her crib by herself… and I am not going to encourage any escapism around here!

I quickly dress my children and pack a picnic lunch, and then strap them into the back of our Honda Civic. Two kiddos are excited for “da playgroun’ an’ yunch wiff Daddy!”

In 10 minutes we’re parking, and I text Elliott to come meet us. I love to see him walking towards us, stretching his legs after a long morning in the vet clinic and so happy to see his family! It’s a beautiful day on base, and we let Lena run around for awhile before sitting down to eat. Unfortunately, I’m learning that Lena rarely eats a full meal when there’s a playground nearby, so I’ll probably have to feed her something else by the time we get home. Oh well, it’s worth it to see her joy… so much so that we’ve made this a weekly tradition.

After the meal, I had a few errands to run in the commissary (grocery store) and NEX (military version of Target). The kid are troopers, but they were tuckered out by the time I finished! (Lena is faking, Gil is not.) Time to head home for naps. I strapped them into the car, and by the time I parked in front of our house, Gil was fast asleep. I carried his car seat to his room, slipped him out, nursed him, and laid him down, and then Lena and I read a couple of stories together before I tucked her in with a song and a prayer.

On most days, I usually get an hour or hour-and-a-half to myself in the afternoon. Precious, precious time! Some days I use this whole time to blog, other days I curl up hungrily with a book or knitting project I’ve been itching to enjoy all day. Today I needed to get various things done around the house, so off I went…

I gathered my supplies for my knitting class that night. It was the last one in a series of four classes, and I was excited to help my students finish up the hat and handwarmers they had started. I teach classes through MWR (community activities organization) on base; this was the second class I’ve taught, and I’m teaching an advanced class in December. They’re a lot of fun!

I also folded and delivered some laundry…

… and put the clean, dry sheets on our bed. It won’t be long before I’ll need to change out the light blanket for our toasty-warm feather duvet for the winter months. Our house has no central air and electricity is prohibitively expensive in Italy, so it gets cold in the wintertime!

I walked back into the kitchen just as the sun lit up the valley below Mt Etna. I love this enormous kitchen window; it’s like having a painting on our wall that magically transforms with the changes in weather and seasons.

I frosted cupcakes for dessert that night… and might have treated myself to an extra one!

And finally I prepared dinner, because I wanted to have everything ready by 5pm so we could eat before I left for my knitting class at 6:15. I put the final touches on this delicious recipe, made baked potatoes according to this great tutorial…

… and made my favorite salad: greens with dried cranberries, chopped walnuts, and goat cheese, and usually finished with a blush wine viniagrette.

And then the kids were up and Elliott was home! How did I only take two pictures of Elliott all day?! But there he is, handsome stranger.

We opened presents and cards before dinner, where there were many fun surprises. I was so excited to get this sweater from my parents, which I’ve been eyeing for awhile. There were other gifts and gift cards from sweet family members, including these books and immersion blender (thank you, Elliott… soups all winter!!!):

And then we feasted, and then we ate cupcakes! I couldn’t find a birthday candle for me (and Lena) to blow out, but my family did sing me “Happy Birthday,” Lena with a gigantic smile spreading across her face as she realized we were singing one of her favorite songs for a real birthday, not just for fun. I love them so.

And that is where I forgot to keep taking pictures… oh well. After dessert we dashed around in a flurry as Elliott bathed the kids and I put food away, and then I put Gil to bed and raced out the door. The knitting class was so much fun, as was coming home to find my hubby had once again cleaned the kitchen. Elliott and I spent a quiet evening together, reading and talking as we always do, thankful for this peaceful time at the end of the day.

I know I’ll look back on these days and probably be amazed by the simplicity of our lives. I will remember being bored at times, overwhelmed at others, and often numbed to the joys because of the endless needs of my young family. But I hope I also remember that I knew I was richly blessed, and that I was very happy, and that I was so well loved.

9 :: in a picture an hour, Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, family, home sweet home, life lately

how we spend our days {Part 1 of 2}

November 18, 2013 at 3:58 pm

Right before Gil was born, I did a two-part blog series documenting a regular day at home with Lena. I knew those days were precious, and I wanted to capture the whole day in images as best I could (mostly for my own sake!). Little did I know that Gil would be born the next day. That really was the very last day in that stage of our lives.

Just like last January, change is on the horizon for us now. We will only be in Sicily for another 8 months, and after that I don’t know where we’ll be or what my everyday life will look like. I could very well go back to work, and/or my children might be in school or daycare. Who knows?

There is also change in the weather here, as the autumn winds begin to whistle around our house on the cliff and the fields below us once again turn lush and green with the winter rains.

And there is change in our children. They are not the same from day to day or even moment to moment. When I took these pictures last week, Gil preferred to scoot everywhere, hoisting himself forward on his two arms and dragging his legs behind him. Now, just four days later, he’s marching around on all fours with military precision. Lena has probably learned 10 new words. How can I keep up with all this change?

Of course the answer is that I can’t keep up with it. I can only enjoy these fleeting days filled with growth and development and constant newness. So, in order to capture a little bit of these days for my memory, I grabbed my camera on the morning of November 14th — my 27th birthday. It was a special day in some ways (hot breakfast and cupcakes and presents, oh my!), but in others it was just the same as most others, because sameness — rhythm, routine — is necessary with young ones.

How we spend our days is, after all, how we spend our lives. (Annie Dillard)

So here is a day in our lives.

On that morning, Elliott let me sleep in… which was blissful! We’re terrible at going to bed on time, and so we end up getting 6-7 hours of sleep most nights. It just isn’t enough for either one of us, but we are starved for time to work on projects and spend time together after the kids are in bed, so I doubt our bedtime will change anytime soon. To cope with this, we’ve started helping each other sleep in, which makes a monumental difference in our attitudes.

As soon as I stepped into the living room, Lena ran towards me holding a birthday card, her face lit up like the sunrise and words bubbling out of her with excitement. She showed me the balloons, heart, and letters she and Elliott had drawn together, and then she opened up the card to show me five globs of scribble, which she pointed to in turn and described as, “A blue lion… and a red lion… and a yellow lion… and a green lion… and a… a pink lion!” Except “lion” was more like “yion.” You could have cleaned me up off the floor with a sponge; I totally melted into a little puddle of love.

I scooped her up and took her back to bed with me for some snuggles while Elliott disappeared into the kitchen…

… and returned a short while later with breakfast on a tray! Hot coffee, bacon, an egg, and two pancakes (one with syrup and one with Nutella and banana, just the way I like them). He then took Lena and left me to eat and read quietly in bed. For some reason, this seemed like the very height of luxury to me right then. I didn’t have to jump up to grab anything, and I didn’t have to feed anyone but myself. And I could read! “Honey, that was wonderful,” I told Elliott, “We have got to treat each other to it more often!”

Elliott had to run out the door to work, so I took over duty in the kitchen. He gave us each a kiss and dashed out the door as we made plans to see him later for a picnic on the playground.

Out the kitchen window, I drank in the view of Etna, the volcano that dominates the eastern Sicilian skyline. On winter mornings there’s barely a cloud in the sky. Breathtaking!

My little ones were finishing their breakfast. They are both huge fans of pancakes and eggs, a treat in our house!

Lena and Gil love to “snuggle” in Gil’s bed, where they play with toys, roll, and tumble. Lena particularly enjoys this because it’s the only time she gets to have a pacifier (Gil’s, of course), which she still misses very much. Sometimes she seems so mature, and sometimes I see glimpses of the little girl that was Gil’s age… wasn’t it just last week?!

Since they were safe and happily playing in Gil’s bed, started a load of laundry in our tiny Italian washing machine. Afterwards I moved them to my bed for more snuggles as I got ready for the day.

Gil’s gets busier by the day. Drawers, cupboards, and doors are his favorite things, and he loves to open and close them and see what’s on the other side.

Caught ya!

I moved into the bathroom, and they followed me… and disemboweled my toiletry bag. Lena found something for her lips…

I caught Lena jumping on the bed — a forbidden but also an irresistible temptation for her! — and moved the group to the living room rug, where we keep a rotation of toys. Gil pounded one of the cat’s toys onto a vintage Fisher Price xylophone, which I was stoked to find at a ~~junk~~ antique fair last week.

Lena asked me to help her make a “choo-choo train,” which is a line of blocks that she can then roll her cars over.

Gil found an actual choo-choo train.

Siena, our constant companion. I have been so grateful for her tolerance and even fascination with my children as they’ve grown. She lets Gil almost smother her before she disentangles herself, and she has always been gentle but firm in letting the kids know her limits. She’s eager to be right on the periphery of our activity, a quiet shadow following us around the house.

After this, it was about 10am and Gil was ready for his morning nap. I changed his diaper, zipped him up in a sleep sack, and then nursed him on the guest room bed. Lena — who is not very good at amusing herself — quietly slipped into the room and snuggled up next to us, doing her best not to talk. After a few minutes I laid a drowsy Gil down in his bed, and Lena and I tiptoed out of the room.

In the kitchen, clouds obscured Mt Etna already.

Lena read a library book while I gathered ingredients for carrot cupcakes. I had to teach a knitting class at 6:30 tonight, and we like to eat and put Gil to bed before I go. Because of this, I needed to have dinner ready by 5pm. I wanted to make it special — it was my b’day! — and fun for my family. I’ll cash in on my birthday reward of a husband-cooked meal some other time!

As the cupcakes baked, I mixed spices to marinate the meat for this incredible recipe…

… and chopped onions, tomatoes, and peppers as part of the criolla salsa to accompany the meat.

That’s about half of the photos from that day. I’ll pick up tomorrow with some cloth diaper-folding, a visit to base, my task list during the kids’ nap time, and a birthday dinner!

6 :: in a picture an hour, Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, family, home sweet home, life lately, Mt Etna

a mom doesn’t go on vacation

June 14, 2013 at 8:43 pm

a completely unrelated photo of me and my babies from a foggy morning in Sicily

It’s a quiet mid-afternoon on Friday. I’m sitting outside on my parents’ deck with Elliott; Gil is lying on a blanket at our feet gazing up at the trees; Lena is napping upstairs.

I love being “home” in Virginia. My mom takes amazing care of us and I always feel so pampered while I’m here. I wake up in the morning to a pot of hot coffee (that I didn’t brew myself!) and a big smile… and arms that are eager to hug my little ones and take them away from me so I can rest.

I’m learning anew how important rest is for a mother. After this past weekend — still jet lagged after running around at UVA Reunions — I felt so burned out. I think part of it was the realization that I, as a mother, was not really on vacation. Elliott was all smiles and un-knotting muscles; he had left work behind him and was free! But I was looking at the upcoming month in Virginia and realizing that it looked discouragingly… familiar.

My work does not end just because it’s the summer or because I’m home in Virginia or because Elliott isn’t going to work every day. My work continues: waking up around 6:30 when the first baby is up, putting them down for naps throughout the day, providing activities for both of them (tea parties, walks, playgrounds, books, rolling over, etc.), getting three ~~nutritious~~ meals on the table for Lena, administering discipline with compassionate listening, putting them to bed, waking up to comfort them in the night, and so on and so forth.

My mom and Elliott help with everyone one of these tasks. However, the ultimate responsibility for all of these things rests on me. I need to make sure my children are rested, fed, bathed, nurtured. I am the caretaker of my family, a weighty and wonderful and never-ceasing responsibility.

It’s somewhat overwhelming to look at this work of mine as never ending. (Now, of course there will be different stages to this work. Babies are not the same as middle school children, and middle school children are not the same as college graduates. But still.) For the rest of my life, I’ll be a mom. I’ll always feel a sense of responsibility to care for my children, to meet their needs before my own, to love them no matter our age or stage in life. I’ll never be “free” of this. Illustrations like “motherhood is a marathon” fall short because in some ways the marathon will never be over. I won’t stop running — caring — until the day I die.

And the prospect of that is somewhat terrifying. I have been thinking about it a lot this week, seeking perspective and clarity. The truth is I must learn to find rest and solace in the midst of this work. Resigning is not an option. Two babies and a wonderful husband are counting on me. They need me. Right now.

So what do I do? While I don’t have a single, brilliant solution, I have noticed a few things that have helped me lately. They seem so small in the face of the enormity and beauty of this task. But they have helped me to show more grace to my family. And grace is what gets us all through the day, through the marathon, and Home.

Here they are:

Setting goals. At the start of the day I often say, “[X] is the one thing I want to get accomplished today.” It might be sweeping the floors, finishing a book, writing a long-overdue email to a friend or sibling, doing three loads of laundry from start to finish, or even making one particularly dreaded phone call. (I hate the phone.) Having annual goals helps me too… although I’ve been slacking on my 2013 goals lately. Maybe in the second half of this year…?

Asking for help. So simple, so hard. I’m getting better about it since Gil was born. (I need it more since Gil was born; two is so much harder than one.) Also it is absolutely key to ask my husband for help graciously and before I am too desperate. Can I get an “amen”?

Getting enough sleep. I can manage on about 6 hours a night for about 2 weeks and then I fall apart. I’m terrible about putting myself to bed on time, though, and unfortunately so is Elliott! Any tips?

Drinking enough water. At home I have this cupand carry it around the house with me. I need to get back into that habit while in Virginia.

Reading books, essays, or even blogs that affirm this work of motherhood and caring. My favorite book on the topic is Andi Ashworth’s Real Love for Real Life. Two other books I want to read about caregiving are this oneand this one. Do you have any other recommendations?

Finally, prayer and Bible study. Why does this often become so optional to me when it should be my biggest priority?? After reading through the Bible twice since we got married, Elliott and I are mixing things up a bit by reading a book about grace. It’s provoked some great discussion and it’s been good to read together.

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How do you pace yourself in the midst of this great, vacation-less work of motherhood?